Author Archives: John Lithium
Xorgett – Pareidol Detarutas (Opal)
Label Description: Xorgett’s latest offering occupies a singular territory where processed cello becomes a vehicle for deep listening and destabilized perception. Moving beyond the academic severity often found in electroacoustic work, these compositions achieve a rare balance between instrumental virtuosity and electronic intervention, creating environments that feel both archaic and hypermodern.
The integration of voice and strings produces moments of startling intimacy, yet the electronic treatments ensure we remain at a critical distance – never quite able to grasp the human elements before they dissolve into granular cascades and spectral residue. There’s a profound tension between the cello’s inherent warmth and the clinical precision of digital processing, suggesting both the comfort of familiar forms and their inevitable dissolution.
What distinguishes this work is its refusal to settle into either pure abstraction or conventional musicality. Instead, it charts a course through territories where recognition constantly slips away – like watching faces emerge and recede in clouds. The result is less a collection of compositions than a series of perceptual exercises, each track carefully dismantling our expectations of how acoustic instruments should behave in electronic spaces. This is music that demands full immersion while remaining eternally elusive.
In moments of “representational catastrophe,” Xorgett transports us into a hypnotic state, a radical sensory overload that dissolves meaning and thrusts us into “hypostasis”—a liminal zone where abstraction and the concrete collide. These tracks are a sonic journey from order to abyss, from symbolic meaning to pure, resonant sensation—a soundtrack to the world’s own oscillating dance between chaos and creation.
Andrew Liles – Without Wisdom (Self-Released)
Label Description: Without Wisdom features 8 new songs based on those anxious moments of anticipation in the dreaded dental waiting room.
In the 1970s when I visited the dentist, the music they played in the waiting room was slow melancholy jazz, jazz featuring the vibraphone. I alluded to this on my recording ‘Bad Vibes Waiting Room’, which appeared on the 2007 album Black Hole.
Teeth. Teeth are not really fit for purpose are they? All my neuroses and fears manifest in my mouth. You have to work at keeping your teeth, it’s an eternal battle. Natural teeth are disjointed, irregular shapes and never brilliant white. They are not neat and shiny and all in a row like a Hollywood grin, unless you are lucky of course. There is no beauty in them, they are ugly, they fail, they rot, they don’t grow back and at some point they will cause unmitigated misery for practically everyone.
I have always had weird teeth. My incisors are Draculaesque. I was ridiculed at school for having them. In later life I have been asked several times where I have had them ‘done’, people assuming I have willingly had them cosmetically altered. I always reply that it’s a congenital deformity. What makes them even more pronounced is the fact that the neighbouring two teeth are, bizarrely, still milk teeth.
I’ve had some terrible experiences at the dentist. I have been in waiting rooms with people running out screaming. Once, the dentist came into the waiting room covered in blood, moaning about patients only coming to him when they were in pain. I have had unnecessary extractions and unnecessary fillings.
I was very much a victim of the ‘heavy metal’ generation. For those who don’t know, in the 1970s, the NHS in the UK encouraged dentists to ‘restore’ teeth, which led to many children receiving extensive and often pointless dental work. The ‘drill and fill’ abuse of the 70s meant that dentists were driven by financial gain rather than the patients’ wellbeing. This resulted in the ‘heavy metal’ generation, creating victims of the predictable and ugly consequences of when money and healthcare coalesce.
A couple of years ago I had a wisdom tooth extracted. It no longer had any socket left to keep it fixed in place and needed to be removed. I asked the dentist if I could keep it.
You can own it… if you like. I am literally selling my own body parts.
Send an email to andrew@andrewliles.com with a price you would like to pay for it.
The highest bidder will win the tooth, which comes in a presentation box with a signed Polaroid.
Images can be found here – www.andrewliles.com/discography/without-wisdom/
Final offers are due by midnight GMT 14th February.
P&P will be added to your bid.
Teeth. Teeth are not really fit for purpose are they?
JANUARY 2025: DESCEND AND DISINTEGRATE
T.A.G.C. – Iso-Erotic Calibration (Cold Spring)
Label Description:
Carefully constructed aural rituals from T.A.G.C., this album maps new realms in the area of sensual electronic music. Founder Adi Newton (Clock DVA) uses The Anti Group as an outlet for his research in psycho-acoustic music. “Iso-Erotic Calibration” explores the potent topic of human sexuality. Recorded over a period of three years, this could be considered on of their more “accessible” albums.
Originally released in 1994 (Side Effects, the label of Lustmord, Musica Maxima Magnetica, and Adi’s own Anterior Research Recordings), we are proud to present the album for the first time on vinyl, as well as the first official CD reissue, fleshed out with four bonus tracks: two were bonus digital-only tracks (2013); one track is taken from the soundtrack to the 2011 T.A.G.C. film ‘Given’; one is a remix of the title track.
The Anti Group Communications (T.A.G.C.) was devised by Adi Newton and Steven James Turner as early as 1978 as a multi-dimensional research & development project. TAGC are not affiliated to any one system of philosophy or epistemological paradigm or occult fraternity but are open more to individual systems and innovative thinkers Science, Art, Music Sonology, Visual Arts, Literature, Research & Publication are its main areas.
The artwork is filled with text and illustrations supporting the different songs.
• CD in 6-panel matt-laminate digipak.
• Black LP on 180gm heavyweight vinyl in a matt-laminate sleeve.
• Ltd 300 x Brown LP on 180gm heavyweight vinyl in a matt-laminate sleeve.
credits
releases January 17, 2025
All compositions and production by Adi Newton, 1994.
All tracks from original DAT masters recorded in Florence, Italy, 1993, at the Anterior Research Station.
Iso-Erotic Calibration originally released by Anterior Research Recordings (ARR 003), Musica Maxima Magnetica (eee 20) and Side
Effects (DFX 21).
Bonus CD tracks:
Track 8: remix
Track 9: from the soundtrack to the TAGC film ‘Given’ (2011).
Track 10 & 11: from the digital-only edition (2013)
Mastered for Cold Spring by Martin Bowes at The
Cage, Coventry.
Cover image by Leonor Fini, La Toilette Inutile (‘The Useless Dress’), 1964, oil on canvas. One of two paintings of Ophelia by Fini.
New artwork design by Adi Newton.
Layout by Abby Helasdottir.
Iso-Erotic Calibration: photograph of Unica Zurn by Hans Bellmer (used as the cover of Le Surréalisme, Même 4, 1958).
Union with Sirens: collage by Karel Teige, 1942
Mercurius & Neurological Engineering: montages by Adi newton, circa 2010.
Psychophonphilia: La Permutation Des Sens drawing by Hans Bellmer, 1950.
Annals of Sancity: 19th Century painting of Eerie Scene With Incubus Demon, after Johann Heinrich Füssli.
Ethemeral: Engraving by Louis-Jean Allais of a mural painting from Tomb KV9, Valley of the Kings, Egypt.
Kati Astraeir and Christopher Alvarado – Realms of Thoth (Petroglyph Music)
Label Description: Thoth, in Egyptian religion, a god of the moon,
of reckoning, of learning and of writing.
He was held to be the inventor of writing,
the creator of languages, the scribe,
interpreter, and adviser of the gods,
and the representative of the sun god, Re.
His responsibility for writing was shared
with the goddess Seshat.
Ivy Chalice – Noctifer (Library Of The Occult)
Label Description:
Ivy Chalice release their highly anticipated follow up to last years ‘Nachtmahr’, with Noctifer, on Library of the Occult Records. Drawing inspiration from classic cinema and the evocative sounds of the 1960s and 70s, Noctifer blends acoustic textures and ethereal vocals with a shadowy electronic edge, crafting a musical experience that is as haunting as it is hypnotic.
Noctifer (“bringer of night”) is an album of shadowed landscapes and eerie tales. Ivy Chalice conjures a soundscape where dark folklore, dreamlike acoustics, and modern electronic elements meet. The album’s narrative threads echo the haunting charm of films like The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man, as well as the spectral allure of British folk revival acts.
Maria Perez Query of Hellebore writes:
“The dense, dreamy atmosphere conjured by Ivy Chalice reaches its zenith in “Der Wald, Die Spiegelwelt,” which has echoes of the classic folk horror series Moondial (1988). Ethereal and eerie, Noctifer feels like wandering into the woods to find a ruined chapel, like opening a gate that leads to a secret realm.”
Featuring tracks that balance fragility and foreboding, Noctifer is both an homage to and a reinvention of folk horror soundscapes. The combination of acoustic instrumentation and shadowy electronic textures offers a contemporary twist on timeless themes of nature, ritual, and the unknown.
Uniform – American Standard (Sacred Bones Records)
Label Description: American Standard begins with a shock. Vocalist Michael Berdan stands alone, screaming, “A part of me, but it can’t be me. Oh God, it can’t.” It all starts with an admission. Beneath the harrowing screams, there’s the pain of bulimia nervosa.There’s the pain of a sickness that is as physical as it is psychological. This is a kind of emergence.
With every movement of American Standard, Uniform Peels off a new layer and tells the story inside of the one that came before it. The lyrics sink down into the core of the innermost self, the small human being crushed in the grip of sickness. To help peel away this narrative of eating disorders, self-hatred, delusion, mania, and ultimate discovery, Berdan sought assistance from a towering pair of outsider literary figures. Alongside B.R. Yeager (author of the modern cult-classic Negative Space) and Maggie Siebert (the mind behind the contemporary body horror masterpiece Bonding), the three writers eviscerate the personal material to present a portrait of mental and physical illness as vividly terrifying as anything in the present-day canon. The result is an acute articulation of a state beyond simple agony, capturing the thrilling transcendence and deliverance that sickness can bring in the process.
American Standard is surely Uniform’s most thematically accomplished and musically self assured album to date. Sections spiral and explode. Motifs drift off into obscurity before reasserting themselves with new power. Genres collide and burst open, form-ing something idiosyncratic and new. There’s a grandeur, due in part to the addition of Interpol bassist Brad Truax alongside the percussive push and pull of returning drummer Michael Sharp and longtime touring drummer Michael Blume, marking his Uniform recorded debut here. However, this magnificence is most clearly attributable to the scale and power of guitarist and founder Ben Greenberg’s arrangements, matching ever elegantly to the intense lyrical subject matter.
Without a shred of doubt, American Standard is a work of art, agonizing in its honesty and relentless in its pursuit of sonic transcendence. It is hideous. It is beautiful. It is necessary.
Ghost Dubs – Extended Damaged Versions (Pressure)
Label Description: GHOST DUBS
‘EXTENDED DAMAGED VERSIONS’
(PRESSURE)
PRESH025
Bandcamp Digital Release via PRESSURE on 17th January 2025
Streaming on Digital Platforms : 31st January 2025
VInyl release : 14th March 2025
“No less deep, in fact debatably deeper still, Ghost Dubs aka Michael Fiedler returns after the runaway success of his highly acclaimed ‘Damaged’ LP(‘Dub/Reggae album of the year’ for 2024 in The Wire Magazine), with ‘Extended Damaged Versions’. Six dubbed out
reworks of tracks from last year’s album, deconstructed by the man himself, again for The Bug’s PRESSURE label(NB Only two mixes have been previously available digitally, ‘Chemical Version’ and the haunting steppa ‘Wired Version’). It will drop both digitally in full,
and subsequently on vinyl in March 2025.
Kickin off with the irresistible seismic grind of ‘Dub Regulator’, a dancefloor driven beast that miraculously eclipses the original mix, the opening cut increases in weight and intensity seductively, upping the fx drenched madness with its incessant droid hypnotics. The mini
album’s mutant dub techno relentlessly probes, stretches and disfigures all of the previous originals, version by version, on this fascinating follow up release to ‘Damaged’. As Fiedler surgically splices and dices his own original source material into successively more warped variants, gleefully atomizing the originals into molten space echo fragments.
‘Thin Dub’ is a masterclass in simultaneous saturation and evaporation, wilfully liquified in the heart of the echo chamber. Anyone already smitten by ‘Damaged'(ie Pole, JK Flesh, Echospace, Valentina Magaletti etc have all graciously, recently acknowledged its greatness), will definitely find further reverb drenched nourishment on ‘Chemical Version’,
which releases a whirlpool of heavily sedated delay trails, and ends up sounding like a wall of sound mirage, vaguely resembling prime Porter Ricks at their sub aquatic peak.
Finally, the ambient pulsations of ‘Lobotomy Version’ sets the album adrift in deepest space, as this superbly crafted collection reflects Michael Fiedler doing what he does best, getting lost in his own mixing desk sorcery, whilst reflecting the captivating morphology of his live
shows, where he magically revamps his heavyweight tracks into pure voodoo, casting spells effortlessly….Not an attempt to just milk ‘Damaged’, ‘EDV’ is itself a standalone triumph, an invaluable transformation of the original album’s material into an epic, fresh, dub odyssey.
Links:
pressurerecords.bandcamp.com
instagram.com/ghost.dubs
facebook.com/ghostdubs
Cousin Silas – Emporium Drone 017 (The Cousin Silas Emporium)
Label Description: Photo by JJ Sproat. Thanks fella.
Pound Land – Live In Nottingham 20/10/24 (Self Released)
Label Description: Recorded by Ben the sound engineer on Sunday 20th October 2024 (’twas a matinee performance in the afternoon). The cavernous venue was the Liquid Light Brewing Company Tap Room (very decent beer but no free food as promised) on an industrial estate in the Sneinton area of Nottingham. The show was part of the annual ‘Hockley Hustle’ festival. Note: this gig featured the debut live performance of new track ‘Cunt Do It’.
“Which leads us nicely onto Pound Land, whose mid-afternoon set at 3pm set the standard for the rest of the day. This five-piece hailing from places as disparate as Winsford and Macclesfield via Derby woke those present out of their post-Sunday Lunch slumber with a blistering sonic assault that sits somewhere between the monologues of John Cooper Clarke, early eighties punk bands like Blitz or Discharge and the doom metal of Black Sabbath via occasional forays into motorik inspired psych rock territories. If anger is an energy (and they cite PiL as an influence as well) then “voice” Adam Stone is a livewire, pent up ball of frustration that’s both incendiary and mesmerising. They have two bass players and a saxophonist (no guitars) and play songs with titles like “Cunt Do It” and “Paralyser” about people with “sausage dicks” and sound like your worst nightmare whilst simultaneously being the most captivating live experience we’ve witnessed in a very long while.”
Dom Gourlay, Under The Radar magazine. 22nd October 2024.
Cheers Dom, although no one in the band is from Winsford. Steve’s from Bolton though
Music For The Rest Of Us 